This particular Made of Fail strip isn’t meant to be funny. Rather, it’s something near and dear to my heart.

I love animals. Sadly, there are too many people who only think they do. They take a cat or a dog into their homes, but as soon as it becomes inconvenient, they discard it. Usually, that happens around this time of the year. Summer vacation time. Everyone wants to get away… oh… there’s that dumb animal that we can’t really take with us. I know, let’s just drop it off at some rest stop along the way. Maybe it’ll get lucky and some truck runs it over. Or, let’s just set it loose somewhere in the city. Sometimes these people show at least enough sense/compassion to turn their pet in at their local animal shelter, where it at least has a chance of finding a new, friendlier home.

Would it surprise you to learn that a lot of those animals were brought into these unloving homes as Christmas gifts?

Anyway. A lot of these animals, although not all of them, end up in shelters. Now, depending on these shelters (and the country), if they get overcrowded, they kill the animals. They feel they have no choice, and as much as I hate it, under their bureaucratic circumstances, perhaps they actually don’t. We all know how little our bureaucracies care about people. It’s no surprise, then, that they care even less about animals.

What this amounts to is that these cats and dogs and assorted other animals are given the death penalty for not being loved.

That is where today’s Made of Fail comes in. It’s an advertisement. If you think of bringing a pet into your home, at least look at your local shelter. But not after having given the matter a lot of thought. If you bring a pet into your home, you’re stuck with it for life. Their life. And that can be quite a bit of time. Cats for example have a life expectancy of around 20 years. You’ll have to care for it throughout those years. In that regard, adopting a pet is not that different from adopting a child.

If you run a shelter, or an organization that promoted adopting and/or rescuing pets from shelters, you are welcome to use this particular strip to advertise. You are free to use it as posters, for print advertisements, leaflets, on your Facebook page, your website, any way you feel it can be useful. You are welcome to customize the text to better fit your specific needs – for obvious reasons, I made it generic. The only condition is that you use the entire strip, including the ownership and permission notice at the bottom.

Just download the graphic from the site. If that doesn’t work, or the graphic is too small for your needs, drop me a line and I’ll provide you with the original-size scan.